The July 2007 issue of Esquire, on sale on newsstands today, contains a new Stephen King novella. The 21,000-word story, “The Gingerbread Girl,” appears in its entirety, covering 23 pages in the magazine.
“Over the last year, we’ve been trying to breathe life back into magazine fiction,” Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger said Monday in a statement. “The best way to do that is to publish nothing other than event fiction-stories that have something in addition to their literary merit to call attention to themselves.” Esquire first published Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Norman Mailer’s “An American Dream.”
Describing the new story, Esquire says “The Gingerbread Girl” is “the story of Emily, who flees to the secluded Vermillion Key off of Florida’s coast after the death of her infant child. Her new neighbor also enjoys the privacy of the key, but the women he brings with him never return home. Emily’s curiosity leads her right into the hands of the madman, but it’s her legs that are her only hope for survival.”
Publisher’s Marketplace reports that there are no plans to publish the story as a stand-alone book, although they do note that King’s Duma Key, which is scheduled to be published in January, “grew out of the novella in some respects (particularly with respect to location).”